Opposition Leader Angus Taylor is a conventional major party leader in wildly unconventional times.
That is now the Coalition’s central problem, which makes him their central problem, which is why Taylor is seemingly already a dead man walking following the Farrer failure.
The loss of Farrer to One Nation isn’t just another by-election embarrassment. It’s a portent of things to come - a true existential threat to the survival of both Coalition parties, the Nationals especially.
One Nation almost doubled the combined Liberal and National vote, an utterly humiliating result for a major party.
While the Nationals' crisis is probably more terminal, given the direct threat One Nation poses in the bush in particular, the minor Coalition party at least has the right sort of leader in Matt Canavan to take on Pauline Hanson.
The Liberals are stuck with Taylor.
Saturday evening’s result was a seismic event on the right of Australian politics. Farrer had been in Coalition hands since its creation in 1949. Now it belongs to One Nation, the party’s first federal lower house win under the party banner.
That should terrify every Liberal and Nationals MP with a regional, semi-regional or outer suburban seat. Just watch as panic starts to truly set in over the coming months.
Saturday evening’s result for Pauline Hanson's One Nation was a seismic event on the right of Australian politics. The byelection should - and, honestly, has - terrified every Liberal and Nationals MP with a regional, semi-regional or outer suburban seat
For years, the Liberal Party has been retreating from metropolitan Australia. Labor has taken plenty of the ground, and the teals have taken the affluent professional inner city seats the Liberals once treated as birthright possessions, doing so across various state capital cities.
The Liberal Party has been squeezed out of the cities, hollowed out in the suburbs, and now One Nation is coming for what is left of it: the regional and outer metropolitan conservative base.
The Nationals should be even more nervous. If One Nation can win Farrer in regional NSW, imagine what it can do across regional Queensland, where the merged LNP is heavily represented.
The surge in support for One Nation doesn’t threaten the Albanese government immediately, but it will one day. Labor didn’t even run in Farrer, probably wisely. It didn’t need to. The right is now doing Labor’s work for it.
If One Nation entrenched itself as the official opposition, it will build the authority it needs to challenge an unimpressive Labor government. Especially if dissatisfaction builds in these tough economic times.
My verdict? Taylor has to go. That may sound brutal given he has only been leader for a few months, but politics is brutal when parties are dying.
He is a dead duck leader offering average conventional politics to voters who have stopped believing conventional politics works.
Taylor’s by-election night speech was a clear cut case of living in denial.
It's ruthless, but Angus Taylor has to go. He's too conventional for an unconventional time. Pictured with Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski, who got barely 12 per cent of the vote, at last count
The Liberal Party can’t out-Hanson One Nation. Nor can it keep pretending the answer is another post-election review, another values statement, another speech about aspiration or another round of factional positioning in Canberra.
Nobody is listening.
But it’s hard to know what else might work, that’s how dire things are for the Coalition right now.
The only thing Liberals and Nationals can hope for is that Hanson retires sooner rather than later, because her brand might not be transferable if she does.
The Coalition needs two or three serious, big-picture policies, announced early, detailed properly, and prosecuted relentlessly. Actual policies that tell disaffected conservative voters the party understands the scale of the national drift and has something to say about it.
And not a dozen that get lost within the length and breadth of their desperation to sound substantive.
Policies that think big but also are clearly costed. Policies that play to people’s self interest during a cost of living crisis, but also help balance the books. Oh, and forget about nuclear policy for now.
At the same time, every remaining Liberal and National MP in a vulnerable electorate should be told to stop playing national commentator and start acting like a local member trying to survive.
Bed down the seat, try to meet every constituent, in every town. Be seen everywhere, helping to fix things. Return calls, become harder to remove than the party brand is to defend.
It would be one potentially effective method to survive the national swing heading One Nation’s way in Coalition-held seats.
Meanwhile, the national message must be carried by someone capable of taking on an unconventional leader like Hanson. Taylor is not that person. Andrew Hastie may not be either, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Hastie is certainly a risk, largely untested too, but risk is almost all the Liberals have left.
The other option is shadow treasurer Tim Wilson, who has more cut-through than Taylor and perhaps Hastie, but there are question marks as to whether he can shift votes away from One Nation, given Wilson’s small-l Liberal leanings.
Generational change, sharper policy, and a willingness to stop sounding like a party waiting for the electorate to come back to its senses are all the Coalition has left. Because the electorate is not coming back, it’s moving on.